Janine Jackson interviewed Mother Jones‘ Ari Berman, about right-wing plans for minority rule, for the July 26, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

 

Janine Jackson: With so much attention on individual politicians’ temperaments, and on the country’s political temperature generally, it’s easy to forget that US governance is based around structures. These structures are being undermined, but they also have design flaws, if you will, that have been present from the start, as explored in a new book by our guest.

Ari Berman is national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones, and author of a number of books, most recently Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It, out now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Ari Berman.

Ari Berman: Hey, Janine. Great to talk to you again. Thank you.

JJ: My ninth grade government teacher said that he didn’t think we’d remember much from his class, but there was one thing we needed to know, and periodically, he would just holler, “What’s the law of the land?” And we would shout out, “The Constitution!”

There’s a belief that we have these bedrocks of democracy—and they might be ignored, or even breached—but in themselves, they have some kind of purity. Where do you start in explaining why we would be helped by disabusing ourselves of that kind of understanding?

AB: That’s right. Our understanding of the Constitution is basically these godlike figures in their powdered wigs decreeing the law of the land in 1787, and having the people’s best interests at heart. And in many ways, the Constitution was a remarkable document for its time, but the founders had their own self-interests at heart in many cases. And remember, these were white male property holders, many of them slave holders, and they designed the Constitution, in many ways, not to expand democracy, but to check democracy, and make sure that their own interests were protected.

And they realized that they were a distinct minority in the country, because they, as I said, were a white property-holding elite, and the country was not. There were a lot of white men without property, and then you think about women, and African Americans and Native Americans, and other people who weren’t part at all of the drafting of the Constitution.

And so the Constitution, in many ways, favors these elite minorities over the majority of people. It favors small states over large states in the construction of the US Senate. It favors slave states over free states in the construction of the US House. It prevents the direct election of the president. It creates a Supreme Court that’s a product of an undemocratic Senate and an undemocratic presidency.

So in all these ways, we have these fundamentally undemocratic institutions that form the basis of democracy. And that’s a fundamental contradiction, because, in fact, our country’s most important democratic document was actually intended to make the country less democratic. And that’s certainly something we’re not taught in ninth grade government class.

JJ: Absolutely. I think of Langston Hughes’ “America never was America to me,” but just to say it outright: US democracy has never meant one person, one vote. So it’s not that there’s this halcyon time that we should be trying to get back to.

AB: It’s funny, because in a way, that’s how we think that democracy should be, and that’s what the Supreme Court said in the 1960s, that the purest expression of democracy was one person, one vote. But if you look at so many of our institutions today, they violate basic principles of one person, one vote.

We don’t have a direct national popular election for president, in which each vote counts equally. Because of the Electoral College, some states matter more than others, and some states count more than others. So in New York, for example, we don’t have the same power of our vote as we do in Wisconsin, or even in Wyoming.

And then in the US Senate, smaller, more rural, more conservative states have dramatically more power than larger, more urban, more diverse states, because each state gets the same number of senators regardless of population. And in many ways, our core government structures violate these notions of one person, one vote.

That’s something that I don’t think we’re talking enough about. I mean, once again, we’ve switched presidential candidates, and it’s all about “how’s Kamala Harris going to do in these six battleground states?” without thinking, “Why do we only have six battleground states? Why do six states decide the elections, instead of 50?” This is a crazy system, if you try to explain to someone that’s not already familiar with how American politics work.

JJ: And yet, if you’re trying to be in the smart people conversation, to say something as basic as, “Well, wait, how come every person’s vote doesn’t count equally? Isn’t that the ideal we hold up?” Then you’re not invited to the party any more, because somehow being savvy is just kind of accepting these sort of fundamental anti-democratic propositions.

AB: It’s funny, and people don’t even know why the system exists the way it is. And that was a major factor into why I wanted to write this book, because I don’t think people even understand how we came to get the structure that we have today.

So the Electoral College was created because, No. 1, the Founding Fathers feared the people being given the right to directly choose the president. And that would be a very difficult argument to make in 2024, that the people should not have the right to choose the president. But, essentially, that’s why the Electoral College existed.

And then secondarily, it existed to protect the power of the slave state, which is something that we don’t talk about enough either, because James Madison, who was really the most influential Founding Father when it came to drafting the Constitution, he actually said that he thought the people would be the best way of choosing the president. But he said he worried that it would disenfranchise the South, because the South had so many enslaved people who couldn’t vote, therefore the Northern states would have more free people, and therefore the South would be at a disadvantage. So he basically came out and said, we should have a direct election of the presidency, except not for slavery.

Well, it’s not like suddenly slavery is over, then we got rid of the Electoral College. We abolished slavery, but we kept the Electoral College. And that’s the kind of thing that I don’t think makes a whole lot of sense to people.

And you hear various arguments against scrapping the Electoral College, but the fact is, 85% of Americans don’t have a vote that really matters in a presidential election. And that’s why polls consistently show that 70% to 80% of Americans don’t want to continue with the Electoral College. Because if you’re a Republican in California, the Electoral College isn’t helping you, either. And there’s a lot of them, too.

JJ: I’m amazed that people are able to respond and say, “We don’t want the Electoral College,” because they’re fighting against high school, and all the information that we’ve gotten, that’s saying that we’re a democracy, and this is the best system we can have. So the fact that people can independently come up with the idea that, no, actually, this isn’t working, is kind of amazing and wonderful for me. But I did want to say: It’s wrong to say Trump came along and ruined everything, but it’s also true that the inequitable effects of these structures have been compounding over time, to the point where they can be gamed, essentially.

AB: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think Trump is both an accelerant and a product of the broken system. I mean, Trump has never won a majority of votes. Trump has been helped by these counter-majority institutions. He was elected, and nearly reelected, because of the Electoral College. If there had been a national popular vote, he would’ve easily lost both times.

He was protected by a US Senate in which Republicans have dramatically more power, because conservative, white, rural states have dramatically more power. So the Senate first advanced his agenda, and then it prevented him from being held accountable for the insurrection.

Then the Supreme Court has dramatically helped him in this election, made it so that he’s not going to face trial for inciting the insurrection before the election, and helped him in so many other ways. And the Supreme Court’s a direct product of the undemocratic way that we elect presidents and elect senators, because five or six conservative justices were nominated by Republican presidents who initially lost the popular vote, and confirmed by senators representing a minority of Americans. So in so many ways, Trump has benefited from this anti-democratic structure.

And then, of course, he’s layered on all of these newer anti-democratic tactics on top of that. We weren’t talking about overturning elections before Donald Trump. There were disputes, of course, about elections, notably in 2000, but there were not efforts to just outright overturn elections until Trump came along. And so Trump has added a lot of anti-democratic features, but he’s been successful in the first place because of the anti-democratic system in which he exists.

JJ: And he’s also helped by saying things out loud, like saying, and I forget when it was, but saying, “We can’t expand voting access, because you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again if we expand voting access.” So he’s kind of laying out a template of what he’s doing.

AB: Exactly. Not only that, because other Republicans have done that too, but then he’s also sought to weaponize a lot of previously nonpartisan things. If you don’t like mail voting, well then, you try to sabotage the post office. No president’s tried to do that before.

If you don’t like the changing demographics of America, you try to sabotage the US Census. No president had tried to do that before, either, in the same kind of way. The whole Project 2025 blueprint, one of the biggest aims of that is to politicize these previously nonpartisan institutions, to turn the federal government from a bunch of civil servants into basically a bunch of right-wing ideologues, controlling every level of power.

And so I think that’s an overriding theme of Trump, is that not only do you benefit from an undemocratic system, but then you try to tilt the system even more, so that everything becomes politicized and everything becomes weaponized to try to benefit this elite conservative white minority, as opposed to benefiting every American, or the majority of Americans, in terms of how these programs or these government institutions are supposed to work and were set up.

JJ: It isn’t that it’s never been recognized that there are these fundamental flaws in the founding premises, if you will, of the country. There have been efforts, historically, to bring about a true multiracial democracy, and the resistance today is built on those past efforts of resistance, isn’t it?

AB: Yeah, exactly. There’s been this long push and pull between democratic and anti-democratic forces, and it would be inaccurate to say that the country’s always been democratic, and it would be inaccurate to say the country’s always been undemocratic. There have been these clashes, and at various times, we’ve expanded democracy. We passed the 13th and 14th and 15th Amendment, to give rights to previously enslaved people. We passed the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act and the Immigration Act and lots of other things, the 19th Amendment, to bring new people into the political process.

But at the same time, there’s been a backlash to those efforts. And I think you can draw a straight line between the backlash to the civil rights movement, and the backlash of the changing demographics of the country, and shifts in political power, and the Trump campaign. I think it’s very clear that when he talks about making America great again, the “again” is before we had things like the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and when the government was dominated by white males.

JJ: Where, concretely, do you see the resistance that you refer to in the book title, which is not, just to be rhetorical, not just a push back against something, but also a push forward. And you’re explaining this importance of our dynamic understanding of history, that it’s always been conflict-shaped, that it’s always been a work in progress. Where do you see the resistance happening right now?

AB: I see the resistance happening in terms of the efforts to try to create a more robust multiracial democracy, efforts to try to elect the first Black senator in Georgia, the first Jewish senator in Georgia, and to do all of these things that have happened. I see a lot of progress happening at the state and local level. I talk about Michigan in the book, a state that was very gerrymandered, very rigged, for much of the last decade, but where people put initiatives on the ballot to ban partisan gerrymandering, to expand voting rights, to protect abortion rights, to legalize marijuana, going around politicians to do these things directly, and to show that, actually, the country’s less divided than we think.

We always hear, “Oh, the country’s so divided politically,” and I think it is divided if it’s a D versus R. But if you ask people, “Do you want to protect fundamental rights? Do you want to make democracy work better for more people?” there’s overwhelming bipartisan support for that. There’s 60–70% support for a lot of these policies. So to me, the problem isn’t what people believe. It’s translating majority opinion into majority rule.

JJ: I was going to ask, where do the hoi polloi fit in? But that sounds like the answer is to get invested and get engaged at a level where you are making a difference. But at the same time, how do we go about making the changes that we want to make at the federal level, at these things that seem impermeable right now? What’s happening there?

AB: I think we need longer-term movements for structural change. And I think it starts with talking about it and doing something about it. I mean, you’re going to see Biden talking about Supreme Court reform. He should have done this four years ago, in my opinion, because it was very clear the Supreme Court was broken and undemocratically constructed and ideologically unhinged back then. But, nonetheless, the fact that he’s going to talk about it will make it easier if there’s another Democratic president to do something about it.

You look at the issue of voting rights; Democrats pushed very hard for federal voting rights legislation. They came two senators short of making it happen. That was a big disappointment. But they got 48 Democratic senators on record saying we should change the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation, which was a really big deal, because they did not start with 48 Democratic senators in that position. And I think if there were to be a Democratic Senate in 2025, there would be probably 50 votes to reform the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation, because the two senators that opposed it, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, are no longer going to be in the Senate. They’re no longer senators.

And so, sometimes, these things take more than one cycle. And I think that’s a lot of the problem with Democrats and progressives, is they’re thinking, OK, we need to accomplish these things in one Congress, or else we’re not able to do it. And, yes, we’d like to be able to achieve everything, but a lot of this stuff takes time.

I mean, the Project 2025 manifesto is the product of 40 or 50 years of conservative legal thinking and conservative weaponization of the government. It’s not like they just woke up one day and decided to do these things. This is a product of a long movement that they’ve pushed for many, many decades.

And sometimes you have to think that this is going to take more time, but I think it starts with a commitment to these issues. One of my frustrations is the Democrats have often been the party of the status quo. I mean, the Biden administration’s often defended how great American democracy is, as opposed to saying, “Yes, there’s a lot of good things about American democracy. There’s also a lot of flaws in the system that we need to improve.” And those flaws in the system are the ones that aren’t talked about enough.

JJ: Just a meta question about history, which, of course, the book is about lifting up relevant history. We have politicians, including Trump, saying, or strongly suggesting, if we don’t win the election, we’re going to take up arms and set up a civil war. But they still refer to the framework. They still say, “if we don’t win, that will mean the election isn’t fair,”—like, fairness somehow comes into the conversation, because they don’t come out and say, “We believe might makes right.” It’s too useful, still, to wave towards some principle of fairness, even if you’re obviously cynically invoking it. But I just think it’s why understanding real history, the dynamic, conflict-shaped history of this country, is so crucial. And if it weren’t crucial, they wouldn’t be trying to stop us from learning it.

AB: Exactly. That’s why there’s been so many efforts to try to prevent an honest teaching of history, because the more you understand the complexity of American history, and the fact that a lot of bad things happened that we still haven’t really done that much about, you understand that, of course, they don’t want to pass policies as a result of things that occurred; so they just want to make it like these things never occurred at all. And the fact is, things like the three-fifths compromise, Jim Crow, slavery, they happened whether we like it or not.

And the reason why they’re trying to prevent these things from being taught is because they’re trying to protect white power at all costs. And they have a whole agenda designed to weaponize and promote white power. And that ideology of white supremacy is premised on either just ignoring history, or distorting it to such a point that white supremacy is the only solution.

And that’s, in many ways, how we got Jim Crow. And I think there’s a lot of parallels between that and what’s happening today, where there’s stronger calls for racial justice, the country is changing. We’re heading towards the majority-minority future. And those people that don’t like it, they’re trying to build a wall—in some cases, a literal wall—to stop what they view as the coming siege.

JJ: And just finally, I do blame corporate news media for allowing fundamentally anti-democratic ideas, like anti-democracy ideas, to be one of the poles in our conversation about how to work our democracy, this triangulation that makes Trumpism just, “That’s a thing some people think.”

Now, clearly, it is a thing some people think, but a lot of people think it because it’s been made acceptable by what they read in the paper, as it being just part of a grownup conversation about how things should happen. I just wonder what you would look for from journalism at this time.

AB: I think the media have normalized Trumpism in a lot of ways, and I think that the media and Trump have a really abusive relationship, because I think for a lot of the media, they realize that Trump is this grotesque, anti-democratic figure, but they also can’t look away. So they’re just constantly giving him airtime, and he’s the best thing for their ratings. And so I think, for a lot of them, the Biden era was kind of boring, and it was maybe too substantive, and Biden himself wasn’t that interesting or charismatic. And so, on the flip side, Trump is such a reality show that you can’t look away.

But I think sometimes the way they cover it, even if it’s bad things Trump has done, like the criminal trial, they cover it in such a lurid, scandalous way that it kind of makes it feel like they’re covering just any person that would be convicted of doing something bad, as opposed to reminding someone, this guy tried to overturn American democracy. He did the worst possible thing you could do, and he’s just back.

And I don’t blame the media solely for that. I blame the United States governing institutions, that there was no mechanism that worked to disqualify him. I mean, the only actual mechanism would’ve been impeachment, and the Senate was too cowardly, and also skewed, to do it. So I don’t blame the media alone, but I also think, so much of the media coverage has focused on Biden’s age, or various things Trump is doing, in terms of picking a running mate and things like that, and sort of covered this election as if it’s normal, as if it’s a normal election, as opposed to the guy who tried to completely subvert American democracy could be back in.

And I just think that’s something that we haven’t heard nearly enough about. That’s not just the media’s fault, but I think the media play a role in the fact that that’s not at the top of voters’ minds.

JJ: Let me just give you one last opportunity to end on a note of hopefulness, or a forward-looking thinking, because these things are being recognized, and folks are trying to address them at various levels. And just what would you say to somebody who’s like, “All right, well, I’m going to pull up the covers.” How do we move forward here?

AB: What I always say is that if you’re not voting or not participating, someone else is, and they’re getting more power because of it. So I understand that it’s an exhausting time, that, in many ways, people are just kind of done with everything. And I feel that way too sometimes. I mean, that’s a natural response.

But, unfortunately, if people don’t get involved in changing the government, it’s going to create a void, and someone else will. And the reactionary forces are more than willing, and more than prepared, to try to fill that void.

So I would urge people to get involved wherever they feel like they can make a difference. And, again, if you’re overwhelmed by the national level, and you’re overwhelmed by the presidency and you’re sick of hearing about it, sick of talking about it, try to get involved locally.

Like I said, research if there’s a cool ballot initiative. In New York, for example, there’s going to be an initiative to pass a New York version of the Equal Rights Amendment. That’s a really interesting thing that nobody really knows about.

There’s lots of competitive state legislative elections, congressional elections, other elections that matter, where maybe you’re more inspired to get involved if you’re turned off by the presidential race.

And I also think we saw, based on the switch in the ticket, a lot of people were yearning to get involved in the presidential race, but wanted a different kind of choice. And you saw that when there was a different kind of choice, people responded to that. So I think it’s more just, find a way to get involved. Politics doesn’t have to be your entire life, it’s actually not healthy for it to be your entire life, but it can be part of your life, and I think that that way you can make a difference, and not allow a more reactionary movement to fill that void.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with journalist Ari Berman from Mother Jones. The book is called Minority Rule. It’s out now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Thank you so much, Ari Berman, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

AB: Thanks so much, Janine, I appreciate it.

 

This post was originally published on FAIR.